Purdue lecture on Woolf, war and airplanes

Elizabeth Evans will give a lecture titled “Virginia Woolf’s Airplanes: Air Power and Aerial Views Between the World Wars” at 6 p.m. on Feb. 17 in Technology Building Room 301 at Purdue University North Central. It is free and open to the public.

Evans, assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame, will examine the effects the growing importance of military air power had on British art and literature during the interwar years. Her research focuses specifically on Woolf’s work, specifically Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937).

In a 2013 essay, “Air War, Propaganda, and Woolf’s Anti-Tyrrany Aesthetic,” which appeared in Volume 59, Issue 1 of the journal Modern Fiction Studies, Evans argues that Woolf is both attracted to and troubled by the unique point of view the airplane provides. She admires its aesthetic possibilities but is disturbed by its seemingly inevitable links to warfare.